A Renowned Climate Sceptic is Converted by his own Research

It is not proper to speak of “climate skeptics,” since all scientists (including we social scientists) are skeptical of all data and theories every day, all the time, and are willing to change our position if enough information and analysis emerges to challenge the old paradigms. But beyond just skeptics, there are always in any debate “contrarians,” people who challenge a theory with little more on their side than radical doubt and deep suspicion, and who unsystematically latch on to every little thing that the theory hasn’t yet accounted for, or which seems to challenge it. Skeptics can be convinced by solid data and argument; contrarians are either harder to convince, or impossible to convince. Some contrarians, as with the billionaire Koch brothers who fund propaganda against climate science, are committed to their position because it is central to their business model.

Climate change skeptics and even some climate change contrarians have increasingly become convinced by the accumulating data that the average surface temperature of the earth is in fact increasing, and that the increase is mainly due to the release by human beings into the atmosphere of masses of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat from the sun and interferes with it from radiating back out into space.

Muller’s study analyzed all the weather data available since 1750 and found that the average temperature of the earth increase by 1 degree F. from 1750 to 1850, and has increased another 1.5 degrees since 1850, for a total of 2.5 degrees since the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

Muller looked at various natural causes of temperature variation and found that statistically they could explain only a tiny amount of the changes. In contrast, human carbon dioxide production tracked closely with temperature increases to the extent that it almost complete explains the warming observed, just by itself.

One surprise of Muller’s study is that he was able to show fairly rigorously that the human-generated changes began in a steady way in 1750, not, as many climate historians had thought, in 1850 or even more recently.

Humans had ever since the invention of fire and then agriculture put some extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and during times when they burned a lot of trees to clear land for other purposes, they may have caused small temperature spikes. But volcanic rocks and the oceans wash the CO2 back out of the atmosphere if it isn’t in huge quantities, so in the old days humans could only really cause blips. Still, mass deaths of humans, as during the Black Plague or the European-induced epidemics that killed off most of the Native Americans, probably caused colder temperatures for a while in the aftermath.

Since 1750, humans have begun altering the climate in a steady and systematic way, overwhelming the ability of the earth to absorb the CO2 and causing it to build up steadily in the atmosphere, producing long term effects on surface temperature. Human activity in the past 250 years has interrupted and reversed a 2000-year long natural climate tendency toward cooler temperatures. If we go on the way we have been, spewing ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we will produce a tropical planet with no ice on it and will forestall any further ice ages for at least 100,000 years. Since there are places humans now live, such as cities in Sindh, Pakistan, that already reach over 130 degrees F. in the summer, likely the planet we are creating will have large swathes of uninhabitable scorching places on it. Climate change will involve extreme weather events like massive storms, and these in turn may damage the ozone layer, sunburning us all to death.

For a historian, the date 1750 as the beginning of the human-induced Great Warming is full of significance. And that significance is coal.

Britain turned to coal for energy after a long period of intensive forest cutting, which reached its height in the 1600s. Wood and charcoal were used for heating, cooking and industrial processes such as iron-making, and as population grew and recovered from the Black Plague, the British isles were largely deforested. The British then reluctantly turned to coal for energy. Coal is smelly, produces clouds of unpleasant smoke, is relatively expensive to transport, and in every way worse than wood and charcoal. But poor management of forests and substantial population growth (British population doubled 1500-1800 and then tripled in the nineteenth century) pushed people to coal. With the development of a practical high pressure steam engine through the 1700s, coal was adopted as the fuel for these machines.

And off we went on the Great Human Warming experiment, fueled by coal and later on petroleum and natural gas.

One obvious lesson of Muller’s study is that coal should be banned immediately and its mining and distribution should be criminalized. We put people in prison for a little pot, but let the coal industry destroy the earth. A few brave souls are protesting environmentally destructive ways of mining coal. But we should all be protesting the poisonous stuff itself.

By the way, there are only 80,000 workers employed in coal mining in the US. There are 100,000 workers in solar energy and a similar number in wind. I suspect West Virginia and western Pennsylvania could have a lot of jobs in wind turbines, and those states and the federal government should help brave coal workers make the transition.

The other obvious lesson is that we need a global Manhattan project to move to clean energy immediately. We don’t have much time. Carbon dioxide emissions were up 6% last year. Massive government-funded research and tax breaks could bring down costs of solar and wind quickly and make geothermal more practical. We need to redo the national electricity grid and put hydropumps in hilly or mountainous regions to keep solar- and wind-generated energy flowing during down times. This task has to be our number one priority, more important than fighting a small terrorist organization in distant lands, more important than spending 20 times on the war industries what our closest ally does, more important that imprisoning people for a few tokes, more important than tax breaks for the wealthy, more important than reproductive issues. Our Congress is a latter-day Nero, fiddling while the world burns, and any of them that doesn’t get it should be turned out in November if you care about the fate of your children and grandchildren.

Ronald Reagan used to fantasize that an alien invasion could unite human beings across capitalist and communist systems. Well, Reaganites now have their chance: Climate Change is a kind of alien invasion, threatening the human species, and here is an opportunity to put aside differences and unite to meet the biggest challenge we have faced in our 150,000 years of existence as homo sapiens sapiens. And, yes, this is an issue and a research that could and should unite Arabs and Israelis, both of them among the peoples most endangered by climate change (Egypt’s delta and Tel Aviv won’t be there after a while if we go on like this).

What we are doing in this generation and the next to the earth will affect it for tens of thousands of years, and we could well be putting our survival as a species at risk. We are certainly likely to kill off most other species. Unfortunately, the worst consequences of our current high-carbon way of life won’t be visible for a hundred years or more. I suppose if we’re unable to look that far ahead as a species, or if we let a few Oil billionaires boss us around, it could be argued that we deserve to go the way of the dodo. But I believe in human beings more than that, and believe it is possible for us to mobilize around this task.

"If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion - which he does, but he’s very effective at it - then let him fly any plane he wants." - Richard Muller, 2008

"There is a consensus that global warming is real. ...it’s going to get much, much worse." - Richard Muller, 2008

"Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate." - Richard Muller, 2003

Richard Muller set up the BEST program (Berkely Earth Science Testi) to challenge earlier studies methodologies. The result: ealier studies were affirmed.
http://berkeleyearth.org/

See also:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Klem on August 02 2012 said:

I don't get what all the fuss is about this guy. He takes data, finds an upward trend over time and concludes that humans are the reason for the upward trend. If he were the scientist he claims to be, he'd know there is no way to support that conclusion.

An upward trend is merely evidence that the climate changes, it is not evidence that CO2 is the cause. The upward trend actually began near the end of the last glaciation 20,000 years ago, he knows this.

The timing of all of this makes me wonder if this has anything to do with the election.

Mel Tisdale on August 03 2012 said:

@ Klem

So, Klem, you do at least accept that the climate is changing. I assume that you do not deny the science that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas because if you do, you will not find a single professional climate scientist that will agree with you.

The greenhouse effect was proven in the mid 1800s. That it might affect the planet's temperature was first raised as a concern by American scientists developing heat seeking missiles after WWII because they found that CO2 was interfering with their missiles ability to track its target.

Not that it matters, but we know from the isotopes that the carbon in the atmospheric CO2 that its origins were in fossil plants that formed the oil and coal from which it comes when we humans burn the stuff.

The presidential election in America also does not matter because both candidates are about as much use as a chocolate condom when it comes to protecting our species.

What does matter is that we start to combat climate change urgently. To do that we need to reduce our production of CO2, and, thanks to the efforts of the fossil fuel industry, do it drastically.

Instead of replying to this, Klem, investigate the subject by going to skepticalscience.com and Climate Denial Crock of the Week on YouTube where you will be able to see just how much you have been deceived.

When you have done that, perhaps you might like to join the call for those guilty of that denial, be they Fox News bozos, media columnists whose papers desperately need advertising revenue, politicians who seek fossil fuel funding. perverse British peers and any scientist who can be shown to have presented known debunked theories, to be investigated for treason. Why treason? Because climate change is going to screw up the wellbeing of all nations on the face of the planet and their citizens, some more than others, but all none-the-less.

We are not at war with Old Mother Nature. All she is doing is what she told us she would do when we first realised that there was such a thing as the greenhouse effect. It is the fossil fuel industry that is our enemy. It has cynically chosen to protect its shareholders in preference to the individual countries where it is found.

Perhaps if we as a species go on a war footing against the problem of climate change, we might, just might, avert disaster, but it will be a close call. As for presidential elections and financial crises, they are as nothing compared to what will happen if we lose that war.

Markie_Mark on August 03 2012 said:

"Thanks" Al Gore, I mean Mr. Cole.

nuttshell on August 06 2012 said:

Its probably a good assumption that the burning of hydrocarbons have contributed to the questionable global warming theory. But, all these articles about global warming need to also include that with the population of around 7 billion, breathing of humans and animals produces a tremendous amount of CO2. In addition it is emitted from volcanoes, hot springs, geysers and other places around the world. So I bet if they were to compare the population curve against the temperature history curve they would both parallel each other closely.

At the presnet time,both population (estimated to stabilize @ 10 Billion in 2100) and output per capita (most of the developing world ie. India, Brazil and China for example are rapidly industrializing) are on an upward trend while carbon intensity and energy intensity (ie improvements in technology) are on a downward trend.

The increase in efficiency has not and is unlikley to ever compensate for the upward pressure of population and thus the rise in atmosperic C02.
see:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Economic-Growth-and-Climate-Change-Part-1.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Economic-Growth-and-Climate-Change-Part-2.html

klem on August 06 2012 said:

Mel Tisdale on August 03 2012 said:

"So, Klem, you do at least accept that the climate is changing."

Of course. My house is located on a drumlin, a lump of dirt left by glaciers 20k years ago. There are also rocks nearby that have ice scratches on them going in two different directions. Those are glacial scratches from two different glaciations over 100,000 years apart. So yes, the climate is changing. Mel, do you at least accept that the climate can change naturally without human influence?

If so, let me ask, in what year did humans take over control of the climate from natural causes?

John on September 03 2012 said:

Hi Klem.
The natural Processes tend to lead to the capture of CO2, and the sequestration of it in the ground as oil and coal, as forest and as algae. The humans lead to releasing that CO2 back into the atmosphere. From memory the pre industrial revolution levels of C02 was 280 parts per million, we are now at about 390 parts per million. I guess in terms of CO2 warming our influence is about 30% if it is linear. The problem is the climate is dynamic and there are many feedback mechanisms.
For example The melting of sea ice makes the water more absorbent to radiation heating up the earth more and so on.
In fact the earth would be rather a cold place if it were not for CO2.
Nature does not care something else will replace us when the earth is no longer suitable for humans
John